How-To

A five-minute guide to building a swarm

By Justin Long ⋅ June 8, 2009 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

What does it take to build a swarm? This isn’t “rocket science.” It’s being done every day. Here’s a short “five-minute” guide to doing it.

Phase 1:

1. Establish an initial personal plausible promise. Do this first, for yourself, not in connection to anyone else. This is your personal goal: what you feel called to do. This is the “attracting center” that will help your swarm build. (The actual swarm’s Plausible Promise may be slightly different as it will probably be the sum total of the PP’s of everyone involved.)

2. Determine your shared values. The PP is what you want to do; the SV is how you will do it (and how you will not).

Bridge One: Now you have to begin sharing your plausible promise around, and seeing who is interested. This is where you have lots of conversations over coffee. Share the PP and ask lots of questions. Listen. Figure out who shares your values. (Simply asking “do you share these values” doesn’t necessarily work. Examine their actions, their philosophy of work, etc.)

Phase 2:

As people begin gathering around the plausible promise in various meeting venues—perhaps online, perhaps in face-to-face meetings, you will need to get down to the actual work of achieving your promise.

3. Identify teachable behaviors. This is one of the earliest steps that a swarm does. Figure out some basic actions that will lead to the promise being fulfilled. The hardest part of a swarm is getting lots of people to do these things.

4. Build modular strategies. Different people in different parts of the world (in the case of virtual swarms) may find different ways of stringing behaviors together to form different strategies. Document these and pass them around.

5. Measurable milestones. Either as a group or in a smaller work group, identify these and set up some process for monitoring them.

Bridge Two: Now that you have a core group, you need to help ‘hub’ type people begin forming and facilitating connections between people. Swarms work primarily on the basis of interpersonal relationships.

Phase 3

With additional growth, use the following ideas to increase inter-personal and intra-small-group connectivity.

6. Enable open membership. Define a process whereby anyone can join the swarm.

7. Identify roles and responsibilities for people to commit to, perhaps requiring specific-time commitments. These indicate people of greater commitment to the swarm.

8. Encourage crowdsourcing: audience participation, breaking strategies into teachable behaviors anyone can do anonymously (editing a wikipedia is a classic example of a near-anonymous activity), with not-anyone-behaviors done as a role/responsibility.

9. Collaboration: encourage swarm members to collaborate in small groups on tasks and resource development.

10. Make communication easy: centered around the plausible promise. Focus on short, data-rich communication enabling specific and immediate action. (Like the bee-dance, which tells the precise direction to food.)

11. Permissive accountability: make all teachable behaviors permission-free; make specific roles and responsibilities permission free for those committed to the responsibility; make people accountable to act rather than using accountability to prevent action.

12. Self-directed. As the swarm grows, facilitate decision-making on administrative & logistical questions by consensus government so that the whole is heard.

Phase 4

As the swarm grows, you can use some of the following ideas to enhance its ongoing sustainability.

13. Be careful to remain as autonomous as possible, to preserve the vision. Money and Power should be kept out of the picture to the greatest extent possible.

14. Localize everything: translate and contextualize all behaviors, milestones and resources into local situations.

15. Encourage researchers to monitor trends, watching for things that will affect the swarm.

16. Seek out virtuous cycles and amplifications: hunt for teachable behaviors that become less costly and/or more powerful over time.

17. Seek out viral actions: also hunt for teachable behaviors that are “sticky” and attract more members to the swarm. The “holy grail” is a teachable behavior that (1) achieves the promise, (2) becomes amplified in power over time, and (3) attracts others.

18. Become the best in your “niche”—put in the 10,000 hours necessary to become an expert and the best at what you do.

19. Use communication to persuade the culture around you that your cause is good, making culture more amenable to you (and thus opening up more resource pools and manpower).

20. Manage your waste, reducing it (and your costs) as much as possible.

21. Work to build momentum/speed of the swarm toward the plausible promise: increasing Drive, Inspiration, Energy, Power, Strength.

Phase 5

As the swarm grows to its maximum attainable size, greater efficiency and effectiveness through improvement and innovation will become ever more important. These tools will help:

22. Practice continuous improvement: read and implement everything you can of ‘lean manufacturing’ principles, continuous improvement, etc. There’s plenty of great resources in this area. This will continuously improve your existing behaviors. Then…

23. Build a cultural ‘Greenhouse of Innovation’: encouraging members to create new behaviors, actions and strategies to take advantage of new opportunities.

24. Encourage pure research to discover new opportunities, that can lead to new behaviors.

25. Embrace wildcards. Game-changing events can change the possibilities of fulfilling your plausible promise, opening up never-before-seen avenues. Be prepared to embrace change on a massive scale.

Phase 6

As the swarm becomes established, it will no doubt develop resources and tools for training, enculturating new members, and accomplishing its goals. Here are some ways to make these tools easier to reproduce.

26. Use open-source tools as much as possible in order to reduce costs. There are plenty of good open source tools available that will accomplish 80% to 90% of what needs to be done, and often this is good enoguh.

27. Build swarm tools using standard formats and in standard ways for maximum redistribution and usability. If you publish a magazine, consider making it available in PDF format for download as well as in print form, for example.

28. Encourage people to reuse your resources in order to make new ones, as a way of getting your ideas, research, and tools into the culture.

Phase 7

Finally, continue to seek growth. The whole point of a swarm is identify a goal that needs to be reached, specific ways to reach it, and then get as many people as possible to implement the needed actions. So:

29. Expanding growth: encourage growth in membership. The more core members and hubs you have, the more people can be directly involved in the swarm; and through direct involvement, a broader audience can be reached.

30. Help start new swarms that will head in similar paths toward the same (or related plausible promise). “Those who are not against us are for us…”

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